Anonymous
Post 08/20/2022 11:57     Subject: Jen Hatmaker
Jen has made several posts suggesting she’s the one showing up as a parent for the kids. I’ve wondered if that means he isn’t helping with time, money, or what?

Of course he lost his house, friends, and income via Jen when he divorced her so he’d have a rebuild his whole life but he’s always seemed to relish fatherhood.
Anonymous
Post 08/20/2022 11:48     Subject: Jen Hatmaker
Anonymous wrote:^both of these responses are well-said.

In my Midwest Christian upbringing it was a lose-lose situation as a woman. You either followed the church’s teaching to shun sex until marriage, and thus were inexperienced/prudish, or you had sexual experiences and were called impure for it (or worse names). And whether married or not, sex had a really patriarchal vibe to it, because there was no education or examples of what egalitarian, mutually pleasurable, emotionally-connected intimacy looked like. It was just always depicted as like, a guy’s conquest of a girl.


I was born in the mid-60s and raised in rural Indiana. My family was one of the few non-practicing Christian families (we were, though, culturally Christian). The responses from the 2 PPs about sex ed in their areas seems identical to mine. Sex was only between married heterosexuals, a husband could not rape his wife, if you 'led a boy on', it was your fault if it went further than you wanted to, men/boys might masturbate because they had needs - good women didn't have those needs, and no one wanted to marry tarnished goods.

It took me a long time to move beyond this conditioning.
Anonymous
Post 08/20/2022 11:38     Subject: Jen Hatmaker
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:Yes I was kind of surprised with as much as Jen acts like Ben is her favorite, Brandon is the one driving him to college, and carrying all of his stuff, and helping him move in.. And Ben is smiling and looks pretty happy about it


I think Brandon posts any time he does any parenting—which seems to only be the fun/easy stuff—and maybe that’s why Jen makes all of the passive aggressive remarks about being a single mom.



Or maybe he just posts on birthdays and holidays like normal people do. Not every time they are together.
Anonymous
Post 08/20/2022 11:19     Subject: Jen Hatmaker
Why are you competing over who had a rad sex ed class? lol It’s completely out of someone’s control what their sex ed class was like in the 80s and they’re just describing what it was like? It seems Jen had a similar experience.

Anonymous
Post 08/20/2022 10:51     Subject: Jen Hatmaker
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:…..Kansas can very reasonably be included in the Bible Belt. For the sake of the sex ed discussion. (I’m younger than Jen but went to public school in Kansas City MO and it wasn’t all that great for me either. More puberty stuff, perhaps, but I don’t think consent or contraception or pleasure were discussed meaningfully at all.)



Pleasure and consent were not touched on at all in my sex Ed in 1984 rural IL.(real similar to small town Kansas) I was a junior in college before I had date rape really explained to me in a class.


I am sooooooo confused by all of these comments…… You were literally never told that you didn’t have to have sex if you didn’t want to?! Your teacher was just like, “If you’re on a date, and the boy says he’s ready, you MUST give it to him!”??? And also, pleasure wasn’t discussed? You never knew it was supposed to FEEL GOOD??? Why did you think people had sex all the time? Or do you mean - they didn’t teach you technique????

Admittedly, I haven’t listened to Jen’s podcast. But all of these comments are so weird. What do you think your high school health teacher SHOULD HAVE told you?




Your comment is poorly worded. Perhaps you are triggered. I’m sorry if our experiences 35+ years ago on rural public middle school sex ed is weird for you.

Clearly we all understood sex must be pleasurable for it to be so desired by everyone. We’d all seen sex scenes in movies that suggested enjoyment. However our sex ed did not include any reference to anything besides simple heterosexual intercourse. There was not any communication about consent and what that could look like in real life. There was an attitude back then that if you messed around with a guy doing foreplay (also a topic not discussed) and sex occurred whether you really wanted it or not you had put your yourself in that position so it was your fault. Myself and many of my friends lost our virginity in this way. We’d all been told to wait till marriage but found ourselves with boyfriends who wanted more and more and frankly the foreplay felt good. The line was easily crossed once we were undressed and in vulnerable positions. These boyfriends knew our wish to avoid intercourse but that was overridden by their desire to penetrate. Seems clearly wrong now but the culture was different then. I can’t describe the heartache we all felt as Christian’s to have failed at maintaining our virginity. Mock if you will but the conservative Christian culture back then was a lot like what Jen and her speaker described on the podcast. Many of my friends had to work through sexual hang ups from spending years trying to avoid intercourse with their boyfriends then being unable to achieve orgasm once married and feeling like they were failing again at not being good at sex. Jen alludes to her and Brandon having sexual problems rooted in their early sexual training. Nothing but mercy for her on this.
This was all before cellphones and the internet. I found romance novels at the public library to read about romantic sex since that was not being explained to me. My dad once found my Jackie Collins’s book and I was in serious trouble. Information from friends was sketchy as we were all having to learn from each other and what we could glean from books and our parents. My parents were by far the most open in discussing sex of my peer group but it was still lacking. We girls would pool our bits and pieces of info and share. To this day my bff’s from my teens are the ones who are the most open with me about their sex lives. Go figure, there’s no shame between us cause we’ve been doing this for decades.


Sounds like my “rural public middle school” sex Ed was actually pretty rad. I’ve always known sex is awesome, and you can do it if you WANT TO or not do it if you DON’T want to. Sorry that wasn’t your experience. ✌🏻
Anonymous
Post 08/20/2022 10:00     Subject: Jen Hatmaker
^both of these responses are well-said.

In my Midwest Christian upbringing it was a lose-lose situation as a woman. You either followed the church’s teaching to shun sex until marriage, and thus were inexperienced/prudish, or you had sexual experiences and were called impure for it (or worse names). And whether married or not, sex had a really patriarchal vibe to it, because there was no education or examples of what egalitarian, mutually pleasurable, emotionally-connected intimacy looked like. It was just always depicted as like, a guy’s conquest of a girl.
Anonymous
Post 08/20/2022 09:42     Subject: Jen Hatmaker
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:…..Kansas can very reasonably be included in the Bible Belt. For the sake of the sex ed discussion. (I’m younger than Jen but went to public school in Kansas City MO and it wasn’t all that great for me either. More puberty stuff, perhaps, but I don’t think consent or contraception or pleasure were discussed meaningfully at all.)



Pleasure and consent were not touched on at all in my sex Ed in 1984 rural IL.(real similar to small town Kansas) I was a junior in college before I had date rape really explained to me in a class.


I am sooooooo confused by all of these comments…… You were literally never told that you didn’t have to have sex if you didn’t want to?! Your teacher was just like, “If you’re on a date, and the boy says he’s ready, you MUST give it to him!”??? And also, pleasure wasn’t discussed? You never knew it was supposed to FEEL GOOD??? Why did you think people had sex all the time? Or do you mean - they didn’t teach you technique????

Admittedly, I haven’t listened to Jen’s podcast. But all of these comments are so weird. What do you think your high school health teacher SHOULD HAVE told you?




Your comment is poorly worded. Perhaps you are triggered. I’m sorry if our experiences 35+ years ago on rural public middle school sex ed is weird for you.

Clearly we all understood sex must be pleasurable for it to be so desired by everyone. We’d all seen sex scenes in movies that suggested enjoyment. However our sex ed did not include any reference to anything besides simple heterosexual intercourse. There was not any communication about consent and what that could look like in real life. There was an attitude back then that if you messed around with a guy doing foreplay (also a topic not discussed) and sex occurred whether you really wanted it or not you had put your yourself in that position so it was your fault. Myself and many of my friends lost our virginity in this way. We’d all been told to wait till marriage but found ourselves with boyfriends who wanted more and more and frankly the foreplay felt good. The line was easily crossed once we were undressed and in vulnerable positions. These boyfriends knew our wish to avoid intercourse but that was overridden by their desire to penetrate. Seems clearly wrong now but the culture was different then. I can’t describe the heartache we all felt as Christian’s to have failed at maintaining our virginity. Mock if you will but the conservative Christian culture back then was a lot like what Jen and her speaker described on the podcast. Many of my friends had to work through sexual hang ups from spending years trying to avoid intercourse with their boyfriends then being unable to achieve orgasm once married and feeling like they were failing again at not being good at sex. Jen alludes to her and Brandon having sexual problems rooted in their early sexual training. Nothing but mercy for her on this.
This was all before cellphones and the internet. I found romance novels at the public library to read about romantic sex since that was not being explained to me. My dad once found my Jackie Collins’s book and I was in serious trouble. Information from friends was sketchy as we were all having to learn from each other and what we could glean from books and our parents. My parents were by far the most open in discussing sex of my peer group but it was still lacking. We girls would pool our bits and pieces of info and share. To this day my bff’s from my teens are the ones who are the most open with me about their sex lives. Go figure, there’s no shame between us cause we’ve been doing this for decades.
Anonymous
Post 08/20/2022 08:58     Subject: Jen Hatmaker
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:…..Kansas can very reasonably be included in the Bible Belt. For the sake of the sex ed discussion. (I’m younger than Jen but went to public school in Kansas City MO and it wasn’t all that great for me either. More puberty stuff, perhaps, but I don’t think consent or contraception or pleasure were discussed meaningfully at all.)



Pleasure and consent were not touched on at all in my sex Ed in 1984 rural IL.(real similar to small town Kansas) I was a junior in college before I had date rape really explained to me in a class.


I am sooooooo confused by all of these comments…… You were literally never told that you didn’t have to have sex if you didn’t want to?! Your teacher was just like, “If you’re on a date, and the boy says he’s ready, you MUST give it to him!”??? And also, pleasure wasn’t discussed? You never knew it was supposed to FEEL GOOD??? Why did you think people had sex all the time? Or do you mean - they didn’t teach you technique????

Admittedly, I haven’t listened to Jen’s podcast. But all of these comments are so weird. What do you think your high school health teacher SHOULD HAVE told you?


Honestly, your comment is the weird one. You think teens are out there having sex because teachers and parents told them it would feel good?! Lol! Biology drives us, no mater what cockamamie story we hear in health class or a church pew. Abstinence only sex ed isn’t effective, but that doesn’t mean it’s not still happening in red states. My public school sex ed included analogies that compared girls who had multiple partners to a used toothbrush and a rose that lost a petal with each new partner. At home and in church, sex was not mentioned. Abstaining from sex until marriage was the focus. Sure, there might be some line about how wonderful it is within the confines of marriage, but the conversation centered around not having sex. And the sex and marriage conversations centered around the wife saving and giving her body to her husband. A popular book when I was in high school was “I Kissed Dating Goodbye.” Josh Harris (who deserves his own thread here) became a Christian celebrity for advocating that people wait to even kiss before their wedding day! Acting like purity culture isn’t a thing and that you are, “sooooooo confused” by these posts is very gaslight-y.

FWIW, Jen’s remaining fan base obviously isn’t that interested in hearing her talk about sex. The post about the Jay Stringer sexual shame podcast has 12 comments.
Anonymous
Post 08/20/2022 08:02     Subject: Jen Hatmaker
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:…..Kansas can very reasonably be included in the Bible Belt. For the sake of the sex ed discussion. (I’m younger than Jen but went to public school in Kansas City MO and it wasn’t all that great for me either. More puberty stuff, perhaps, but I don’t think consent or contraception or pleasure were discussed meaningfully at all.)



Pleasure and consent were not touched on at all in my sex Ed in 1984 rural IL.(real similar to small town Kansas) I was a junior in college before I had date rape really explained to me in a class.


I am sooooooo confused by all of these comments…… You were literally never told that you didn’t have to have sex if you didn’t want to?! Your teacher was just like, “If you’re on a date, and the boy says he’s ready, you MUST give it to him!”??? And also, pleasure wasn’t discussed? You never knew it was supposed to FEEL GOOD??? Why did you think people had sex all the time? Or do you mean - they didn’t teach you technique????

Admittedly, I haven’t listened to Jen’s podcast. But all of these comments are so weird. What do you think your high school health teacher SHOULD HAVE told you?
Anonymous
Post 08/20/2022 05:43     Subject: Jen Hatma
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:I can't anymore with the "we didn't know anything about our bodies" false narrative she relentlessly talks about. I was a middle schooler in 1981 in the Bible belt and our health class taught us all about sexual health and adolescence. Sex was seen as something actually enjoyable and therefore worth waiting for.

Jen has to crap on her past and make it so terrible to make herself look so very victimized.

I did like her candor about how she theoretically wanted to give her kids the language to talk about their sex lives, but didn't really want to have to hear about it. This was a glimpse into the old Jen, the one I felt was honest about her feelings even when they were very unwelcome and awkward.


You were absolutely an outlier is this was your 1981 Bible Belt middle school sex ed experience. I’m calling BS.


Agreed


Bible Belt ‘81 middle schooler and I was taught about sex at home, at church, and at Catholic school.
Your stereotypes of Southern Christians are just that - stereotypes.

But this misses the wider fact that Jen is not from the Bible Belt like she pretends to be

JENNIFER IS FROM *** K A N S A S ***

KANSAS
KANSAS

NOT TEXAS
NOT THE BIBLE BELT
NOT THE SOUTH
NOT EVEN CLOSE

K A N S A S

She is no more Texan than all the Californians who won’t stop moving here

K
A
N
S
A
S




Kansas isn’t the South, but it is in the Bible Belt, so your rant seems…misplaced. I mean, have you ever been to Kansas?! Since we all wound up here to snark about Jen Hatmaker, I’d guess that most of us are bringing lived experiences of Southern Christianity (and/or living in the Bible Belt) rather than stereotypes. I get that this is DC Urban Moms, but it’s highly unlikely that most of us are that democratic, right? I agree with the post that said you’re an outlier in your experience regarding middle school sex ed. It’s 2022 and Kansas still has opt-in sex ed curriculum—40 years later.


You're correct but you don't seem to really get the bizarre cult-like devotion people in Texas have to the state. They believe that anyone not born there is trash, no joke. It's truly something to behold and they definitely believe their own propaganda, hard. It's completely irrational, like, well...a cult. However, the pp you're quoting has it right though, she's not from Texas and is just another LARPer playing it up for clicks and $$$. A total phony. Ironically, this means she fits right in. It's a strange phenomenon.
Anonymous
Post 08/19/2022 23:14     Subject: Jen Hatmaker
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:I can't anymore with the "we didn't know anything about our bodies" false narrative she relentlessly talks about. I was a middle schooler in 1981 in the Bible belt and our health class taught us all about sexual health and adolescence. Sex was seen as something actually enjoyable and therefore worth waiting for.

Jen has to crap on her past and make it so terrible to make herself look so very victimized.

I did like her candor about how she theoretically wanted to give her kids the language to talk about their sex lives, but didn't really want to have to hear about it. This was a glimpse into the old Jen, the one I felt was honest about her feelings even when they were very unwelcome and awkward.


You were absolutely an outlier is this was your 1981 Bible Belt middle school sex ed experience. I’m calling BS.


I was in southern VA in 1981 and had same experience.
Anonymous
Post 08/19/2022 22:41     Subject: Jen Hatmaker
So Tina posed under a street sign that reads "Barbee" and I kind of want to high five her for it. It's hilarious and just the right level of snark.
Anonymous
Post 08/19/2022 21:34     Subject: Jen Hatma
*demographic not democratic
Anonymous
Post 08/19/2022 21:22     Subject: Jen Hatmaker
I have family from both Kansas and Texas and in many ways Kansas is worse (i.e., more close-minded, less diverse.)
Anonymous
Post 08/19/2022 21:12     Subject: Jen Hatma
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:I can't anymore with the "we didn't know anything about our bodies" false narrative she relentlessly talks about. I was a middle schooler in 1981 in the Bible belt and our health class taught us all about sexual health and adolescence. Sex was seen as something actually enjoyable and therefore worth waiting for.

Jen has to crap on her past and make it so terrible to make herself look so very victimized.

I did like her candor about how she theoretically wanted to give her kids the language to talk about their sex lives, but didn't really want to have to hear about it. This was a glimpse into the old Jen, the one I felt was honest about her feelings even when they were very unwelcome and awkward.


You were absolutely an outlier is this was your 1981 Bible Belt middle school sex ed experience. I’m calling BS.


Agreed


Bible Belt ‘81 middle schooler and I was taught about sex at home, at church, and at Catholic school.
Your stereotypes of Southern Christians are just that - stereotypes.

But this misses the wider fact that Jen is not from the Bible Belt like she pretends to be

JENNIFER IS FROM *** K A N S A S ***

KANSAS
KANSAS

NOT TEXAS
NOT THE BIBLE BELT
NOT THE SOUTH
NOT EVEN CLOSE

K A N S A S

She is no more Texan than all the Californians who won’t stop moving here

K
A
N
S
A
S




Kansas isn’t the South, but it is in the Bible Belt, so your rant seems…misplaced. I mean, have you ever been to Kansas?! Since we all wound up here to snark about Jen Hatmaker, I’d guess that most of us are bringing lived experiences of Southern Christianity (and/or living in the Bible Belt) rather than stereotypes. I get that this is DC Urban Moms, but it’s highly unlikely that most of us are that democratic, right? I agree with the post that said you’re an outlier in your experience regarding middle school sex ed. It’s 2022 and Kansas still has opt-in sex ed curriculum—40 years later.